We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Natalie Young a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Natalie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

I started The Trophy Club as a place where I could create the kind of content I wanted to create, and find others who liked to color outside the lines.

I had come to a sort of impasse in my career and I started to realize I was not enjoying my time as part of a system. Creatives need challenges, problems to solve, and others who will enthusiastically engage in the problem solving with them. If you’re working for someone else, it’s always a gamble whether their enthusiasm or desire for innovation, their expectations, or even their daily workflow will align with yours. I felt there were better outlets for my creativity at that point, so when it finally came time to start, I almost felt choice-less in the matter.

I don’t know if I used logic, or that I knew I would succeed, as stated in the question. I don’t know that I’ve ever known I’ll succeed at anything I’ve tried, but I think, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we all know when further exploration of an idea is worth the risk of less desirable potentialities which could follow. I think I have failed many times before The Trophy Club, and continue to fail daily since its inception, so I suppose I would have to define success in the recovery. I have been “successful” in having clients and those clients pay me, yes, but I am more interested in the challenges I’ve learned to navigate along the way – how do I tell them that’s not funny, it won’t work, the orange is bad there, we need to do even better with even less, they still owe me money, they’re going to owe me more money than either of us thought, we have to abandon this idea and move on, this can be better and it’s worth trying, etc.

Natalie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I love this question because I always joke that if you asked either of my dads what I did they’d say, “I’m not sure, I think it has something to do with marketing,” which is like saying “she’s a doctor” and giving no further details on what sort of medicine they practice. Here’s what we do at The Trophy Club if you’re a dad like mine:

The Trophy Club is essentially a creative agency. We focus on content production + strategy. We primarily deal in creating content for social platforms. This concerns things like what you see when you scroll through your feed watching reels, or click on a facebook ad for a fire pit, or open an email from the dog store and see a cute picture – everything you see is made by someone. It’s conceptualized intentionally before it’s executed. We advise in the conceptualization, and we also offer the execution. The execution, in our case, is usually video, though not exclusively.

In our current portfolio, it states, “We exist to remind you that fun is the process, the outcome, and the return.”

If you go to most digital marketing agency websites – even creative agencies, they feel overly masculine and tech heavy. They use language like “solutions” and “performance” at best, and at worst, they try to feign irreverence by including their favorite cocktail or their dog’s name in their bio. They aim to adopt the look and feel of the clients they wish to attract. But what they miss is that those clients have clients. And those people don’t want to watch the content they’re making. Those people don’t care about “performance” unless it’s easy to understand and entertaining. So, when I started The Trophy Club, we came right out of the gate with some very alternative messaging. We don’t care about performance because we know the performance will take care of itself. We create your favorite client’s favorite content. If you ever got detention for doodling on your desk instead of working, you are our target audience.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We are only two years into business, and somehow we’ve already managed a pivot worthy of A Chorus Line.

Our first year was heavily focused on providing ongoing social media + email management. This was never my intent when starting the company – or, not my sole intent – this was simply an answer to the need of the time. Everyone wanted social and we knew social better than most.

What many people don’t realize, however, is that your social media requires a great deal of resources. On Instagram alone for one client, we would be pumping out 6-7 story sets a week, 3-5 posts in the feed per week (could be video of carousel, meme, or static content), and measuring metrics, strategically responding with new content based on those metrics, community engagement, research, graphic design, video editing, spending time begging the client to send us more knowledge we could turn into content…the list goes on. And this would be all for one client for one platform. It took a great deal of manpower and…it never turns off. Instagram doesn’t recognize any bank holiday, or personal day. It never closes. At about the one year mark, my “son” Logan, who was my right hand man, needed a break, and so did I.

About that time, two clients suddenly had to cancel their engagement, lightening the load, and then eventually other contracts ran up, or they hired someone in house, etc, and we significantly thinned out our roster so that we could put our energy into larger scale projects at a lower frequency.

Now we are much more focused on digital strategy and creative direction. It was certainly challenging for a time. We enjoyed so much growth so quickly, and it felt like we had defied all the odds and achieved (traditional) success, and yet we were forced to adapt on behalf of our bodies, and on behalf of the interests of our clients. Ultimately, it gave me some good insights on the nature of the content we are now creating. If you look closely, all the signs indicate we are entering a time where people can feel less ruled by an unknown algorithm and create more meaningful content at a pace that makes sense for them and their audience. In short, you can stop sending the emails and posting every day. Nobody ever asked for that – we were all just trying to yell the loudest in a noisy room.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Do you want to see my collection of beanie babies?

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.itsthetrophyclub.com/services
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsthetrophyclub/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsthetrophyclub
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-trophy-club/